Motion Picture Production Code

The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the time, Will H. Hays.

The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which later became the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), adopted the code in 1930, began effectively enforcing it in 1934, and abandoned it in 1968, in favor of the subsequent MPAA film rating system. The Production Code spelled out what was acceptable and what was unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States.

The office enforcing it was popularly called the Hays Office in reference to Hays and also later the Breen Office, named after its first administrator, Joseph Breen.

Background

In 1922, after some risque films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, the studios enlisted beacon of rectitude and Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hays, who was later nicknamed the motion picture "Czar", quickly tarnished his sterling image by lying before the U.S. Senate, although the American people seemed unconcerned that Hays was less noble than imagined. Hollywood in the 1920s was expected to be somewhat corrupt, and many felt the movie industry had always been morally questionable. Political pressure was building, however, with statesmen in 37 states introducing almost 100 movie censorship bills in 1921. Hays was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year. Hays, Postmaster General under Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee, served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), where he "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrums, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities." The move mimicked the decision Major League Baseball had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal; The New York Times even called Hays the "screen Landis". The Supreme Court had already decided unanimously in 1915 in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that free speech did not extend to motion pictures, and while there had been token attempts to clean up the movies before, such as when the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI) in 1916, little had come of the efforts.

New York became the first state to take advantage of the Supreme Court's decision by instituting a censorship board in 1921. Virginia followed suit the following year, with eight individual states having a board by the advent of sound film. But many of these were ineffectual. By the 1920s the New York Stage, a frequent source of subsequent screen material, had topless shows, performances filled with curse words, mature subject matters, and sexually suggestive dialogue. Early in the sound system conversion process, it became apparent that what might be acceptable in New York would not be so in Kansas. But there was still no way to enforce tenets.

Creation of the Code and its contents

In 1929, lay Catholic Martin Quigley, who was editor of the Motion Picture Herald, a prominent trade paper, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, created a code of standards (which Hays liked immensely), and submitted it to the studios. Lord was particularly concerned with the effects of sound film on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to their allure. It was the responsibility of the SRC headed by Colonel Jason S. Joy (a former American Red Cross executive

The code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of "general principles" which mostly concerned morality. The second was a set of "particular applications" which was an exacting list of items which could not be depicted. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation. Miscegenation, better known as the mixing of the races, was forbidden. It also stated that the notion of an "adults-only policy" would be a dubious, ineffective strategy which would be difficult to enforce. However, it did allow that "maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots which does younger people positive harm." If children were supervised and the events implied elliptically, the code allowed "the possibility of a cinematically inspired thought crime." Sexual relations outside of marriage could not be portrayed as attractive and beautiful, presented in a way that might arouse passion, nor be made to seem right and permissible. A recurring theme was "That throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right."

Enforcement

Pre-Code Hollywood: 1930 to 1934

was later banned under the then-unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code.]] On February 19, 1930 Variety published the entire contents of the Code and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete. However, the men obligated to enforce the code, Jason Joy, who was the head of the Committee until 1932, and his successor Dr. James Wingate, were generally ineffective. The very first film the office reviewed, The Blue Angel, which was passed by Joy with no revisions, was considered indecent by a California censor. Although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films, and there were indeed definite — albeit loose — constraints, a significant amount of lurid material made it to the screen. Joy had to review 500 films a year with a small staff and little power. The Hays office did not have the authority to order studios to remove material from a film in 1930, but instead worked by reasoning and sometimes pleading with them. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios themselves. The publication stated that if crime is never presented in a sympathetic light, then taken literally that would mean that "law and justice" would become one and the same. Therefore, events such as the Boston Tea Party could not be portrayed. And if clergy must always be presented in a positive way then hypocrisy could not be dealt with either. The Outlook agreed and unlike Variety, predicted from the beginning that the Code would be difficult to enforce. The Production Code was not created or enforced by federal, state, or city government. In fact, the Hollywood studios adopted the code in large part in the hopes of avoiding government censorship, preferring self-regulation to government regulation.

Enforcement of the Production Code led to the dissolution of many local censorship boards. Meanwhile, the U.S. Customs Department prohibited the importation of the Czech film Ecstasy (1933), starring an actress soon to be known as Hedy Lamarr. The action was upheld on appeal.

In 1934, Joseph Breen (1888–1965) was appointed head of the new Production Code Administration (PCA). Under Breen's leadership of the PCA, which lasted until his retirement in 1954, enforcement of the Production Code became rigid and notorious. Breen's power to change scripts and scenes angered many writers, directors, and Hollywood moguls. The PCA had two offices, one in Hollywood and the other in New York City. Films approved by the New York PCA office were issued certificate numbers that began with a zero.

Breen influenced the production of Casablanca, objecting to any explicit reference to Rick and Ilsa having slept together in Paris and to mentioning that Captain Renault extorted sexual favors from his supplicants. However, both remained strongly implied in the finished version. Adherence to the code also ruled out in advance any possibility of the film ending with Rick and Ilsa consummating their adulterous love, effectively making inevitable the ending with Rick's noble renunciation, one of Casablanca's most famous scenes.

A 1942 Warner Bros. cartoon, "A Tale of Two Kitties", features two cats attempting to catch Tweety, in his first appearance. One cat says, "Give me the bird! Give me the bird!" To which the second cat replies, "If the Hays Office would only let me, I'd give him the bird, all right!" ("Give the bird" means to stick up one's middle finger, an obscene gesture prohibited by the Hays code.)

The first major instance of censorship under the Production Code involved the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, in which brief nude scenes involving a body double for actress Maureen O'Sullivan were edited out of the master negative of the film. Another famous case of enforcement involved the 1943 Western The Outlaw, produced by Howard Hughes. The Outlaw was denied a certificate of approval and kept out of theaters for years, because the film's advertising focused particular attention on Jane Russell's breasts. Hughes eventually persuaded Breen that the breasts did not violate the code and the film could be shown.

Some films produced outside the mainstream studio system during this time did flout the conventions of the code, such as Child Bride (1938), which featured a nude scene involving 12-year-old actress Shirley Mills. Even cartoon sex symbol Betty Boop had to change from being a flapper and began to wear an old-fashioned housewife skirt.

The Code began to weaken in the late 1940s, when the formerly taboo subjects of rape and miscegenation were allowed in Johnny Belinda (1948) and Pinky (1949), respectively. Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue (1953) caused controversy. The film eventually was nominated for several Academy Awards.

Kings Row

) posed a challenge for Warner Bros. because of incest and promiscuity in the novel Kings Row.]] A film adaptation of Henry Bellamann's controversial 1940 novel Kings Row presented problems for Warner Bros. because of the Production Code. The novel contained significant sexual content, including references to incest, as well as euthanasia and the sadism of one of its principal characters, the town physician. It was initially believed that the Code made a movie adaptation of the novel impossible. Joseph Breen, director of the Production Code Authority, which administered the Production Code, wrote to the producers, "To attempt to translate such a story to the screen, even though it would be re-written to conform to the provisions of the Production Code is, in our judgment, a very questionable undertaking from the standpoint of the good and welfare of this industry." Breen said that any screenplay, no matter how well done, would likely bring condemnation of the film industry "from decent people everywhere" because of "the fact that it stems from so thoroughly questionable a novel." He said that the script was being referred to his superior, Will Hays, "for a decision as to the acceptability of any production based upon the novel, Kings Row."

Screenwriter Casey Robinson, producer Hal B. Wallis and associate producer David Lewis with the Three Stooges short subject You Nazty Spy! of January 1940 being the first Hollywood film of any sort to openly spoof the Third Reich's leadership itself.

Hollywood worked within the confines of the Production Code until the late 1950s, by which time the Golden Age of Hollywood had ended, and the movies were faced with very serious competitive threats. The first threat came from a new technology, television, which did not require Americans to leave their house to watch moving pictures. Hollywood needed to offer the public something it could not get on television, which itself was under an even more restrictive censorship code.

In addition to the threat of television, there was also increasing competition from foreign films, such as Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), the Swedish film Hon dansade en sommar (English title: One Summer of Happiness) (1951), and Ingmar Bergman's Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika) (1953). For De Sica's film, there was a censorship controversy when the MPAA demanded a scene where the lead characters talk to the prostitutes of a brothel be removed, regardless of the fact that there was no sexual or provocative activity.

Vertical integration in the movie industry had been found to violate anti-trust laws, and studios had been forced to give up ownership of theatres by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948). The studios had no way to keep foreign films out, and foreign films were not bound by the Production Code. The anti-trust rulings also helped pave the way for independent art houses that would show films created by people such as Andy Warhol and others working outside the studio system.

Finally, a boycott from the Legion of Decency no longer guaranteed a commercial failure, and thus the Code prohibitions began to vanish when Hollywood producers ignored the Code and were still able to earn profits. The MPAA revised the code in 1951, not to make it more flexible, but to make it more rigid. The 1951 revisions spelled out more words and subjects that were prohibited.

In 1952, in the case of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision and held that motion pictures were entitled to First Amendment protection, so that the New York State Board of Regents could not ban "The Miracle", a short film that was one half of L'Amore (1948), an anthology film directed by Roberto Rossellini. Film distributor Joseph Burstyn released the film in the U.S. in 1950, and the case became known as the "Miracle Decision" due to its connection to Rossellini's film. That, in turn, reduced the threat of government regulation that justified the Production Code, and the PCA's powers over the Hollywood industry were greatly reduced.

At the forefront of contesting the Code was director Otto Preminger, whose films violated the Code repeatedly in the 1950s. His 1953 film The Moon is Blue, about a young woman who tries to play two suitors off against each other by claiming that she plans to keep her virginity until marriage, was released without a certificate of approval. He later made The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which portrayed the prohibited subject of drug abuse, and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), which dealt with rape. Preminger's films were direct assaults on the authority of the Production Code and, since they were successful, hastened its abandonment.

In 1954, Joseph Breen retired, and Geoffrey Shurlock was appointed as his successor. Variety noted "a decided tendency towards a broader, more casual approach" in the enforcement of the Code.

Final years: 1954–1968

By the late 1950s, increasingly explicit films began to appear, such as Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1961). The MPAA reluctantly granted the seal of approval for these films, but not until certain cuts were made. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) was released without a certificate of approval due to its themes and became a box office hit and, as a result, further weakened the authority of the Code.

In the early 1960s, films began to deal with adult subjects and sexual matters that had not been seen in Hollywood films since the early 1930s. The MPAA reluctantly granted the seal of approval for these films, again not until certain cuts were made. Strict adherence to the Code was less important as of 1966, with the addition of the advertising label "suggested for mature audiences" (SMA) on some films. In that year, Warner Bros. released the new film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. When Jack Valenti became President of the MPAA in 1966, he was faced with censoring the film's explicit language. Valenti negotiated a compromise: the word screw was removed, but other language remained, including the phrase hump the hostess. The film received Production Code approval despite this prohibited language.

The Pawnbroker

In the early 1960s, British films such as Victim (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Leather Boys (1963) offered a daring social commentary about gender roles and homosexuality that violated the Hollywood Production Code, yet the films were still released in America. The American gay rights, civil rights, and youth movements prompted a reevaluation of the depiction of then themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality that had been restricted by the Code.

In 1964, the Holocaust film The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts and because of a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez that it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful". Despite the rejection, the film's producers arranged for Allied Artists to release the film without the Production Code seal, with the New York censors licensing The Pawnbroker without the cuts demanded by Code administrators. The producers also appealed the rejection to the Motion Picture Association of America.

On a 6-3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an exception conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case" and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent." The requested reductions of nudity were minimal; the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.

The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. In his 2008 study of films during that era, Pictures at a Revolution, author Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA's action was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years."

The British-produced but American-financed film Blowup (1966) presented a different problem. After the film was denied Production Code approval, MGM released it anyway, the first instance of an MPAA member company distributing a film that did not have an approval certificate. There was little the MPAA could do about it.

Bonnie and Clyde

After the Code

Enforcement had become impossible, and the Production Code was abandoned entirely. The MPAA began working on a rating system, under which film restrictions would lessen. The MPAA film rating system went into effect on November 1, 1968, with four ratings: G, M, R, and X. In 1969, the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), directed by Vilgot Sjöman, was initially banned in the U.S. for its frank depiction of sexuality; however, this was overturned by the Supreme Court.

The M rating was changed to GP in 1970 and to the current PG in 1972. In 1984, in response to public complaints regarding the severity of horror elements in PG-rated titles such as Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the PG-13 rating was created as a middle tier between PG and R. In 1990, the X rating was replaced by NC-17, in part because the X rating was not trademarked by the MPAA, whereas pornographic bookstores and theaters were using their own X and XXX symbols to market products.

See also

Comics Code Authority, which functions similarly for the comics industry

Censorship in the United States

Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which offers ratings for video games in a similar grouping to motion pictures

PMRC, a similar group, which sought to control musical content with the Parental Advisory sticker

The Celluloid Closet

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Notes

Sources

Bernstein, Matthew. Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era. Rutgers University Press 1999 ISBN 0813527074

Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies. Cambridge University Press 1996 ISBN 0-521-56592-8

Butters Jr., Gerard R. Banned in Kansas: motion picture censorship, 1915-1966. University of Missouri Press 2007 ISBN 0826217494

Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press 1999. ISBN 0-231-11094-4

Jacobs, Lea. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1997 ISBN 0-520-20790-4

Jeff, Leonard L, & Simmons, Jerold L. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code. The University Press of Kentucky 2001 ISBN 0813190118

Gardner Eric. The Czar of Hollywood. Indianapolis Monthly, Emmis Publishing LP February 2005 ISSN 0899-0328 (available online)

Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968. Rutgers University Press 2003 ISBN 0813532817

Siegel, Scott, & Siegel, Barbara. The Encyclopedia of Hollywood. 2nd edition Checkmark Books 2004. ISBN 0-8160-4622-0

Smith, Sarah. Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids. Wiley-Blackwell 2005 ISBN 1405120274

Vieira, Mark A. Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1999. ISBN 0-8109-8228-5

Further reading

Lewis, Jon, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry; New York University Press, 2000; ISBN 0-8147-5142-3

LaSalle, Mick, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000; ISBN 0-312-25207-2

Miller, Frank, Censored Hollywood; Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1994; ISBN 1-57036-116-9

External links

Motion Picture Association of America: History and Film Ratings

Bibliography of books articles about movie censorship (via UC Berkeley)

Complete list of the 36 'Don'ts and Be Carefuls' of 1927

Complete text of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (without the subsequent amendments)

The Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry (includes examples and articles)

More Sinned Against than Sinning: The Fabrications of "Pre-Code Cinema"

Talking Pictures website: Article by Nigel Watson about film censorship issues accompanied by classroom activities for students

Filmnummers: Numbered list of Production Code certificates of approval

Category:Censorship in the United States Category:Cinema of the United States Category:History of film Category:Censorship Category:Motion picture rating systems Category:1930 establishments Category:1968 disestablishments Category:Self-censorship